Ad Exchange Research

There has been a lot of CS/Econ research attention on sponsored search, not as much on display ads. For a large part, display ads on the Internet have been bought and sold over telephone by sales teams; to a lesser extent, they have been outsourced to intermediate networks and agencies. These processes represented few research problems, if any, to study. In the past few years, however, ad exchanges have emerged as an alternative where display ads can be bought and sold via real time auctions, and these automated exchanges are a great source of challenging problems.

Here is my writeup that describes a model of ad exchanges and proposes research problems in auction theory, optimization algorithms, and other areas that arise; this is the text for my forthcoming talk at WINE 2009. It represents insights from working with the terrific team that launched Google's Ad Exchange recently. Here are official blogs 1 and 2, Noam's post, and other posts, on the launch. For general ad exchanges discussions see: ads 101: ad exchanges, real time bidding, etc.